Overview

Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, Foreword by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals ...

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0132244799 BRAND NEW. PLASTIC WRAPPED. We are a tested and proven company with over 900,000 satisfied customers since 1997. We ship daily M-F. Choose expedited shipping (if ...available) for much faster delivery. Delivery confirmation on all US orders.Read moreShow Less

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Overview

Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds identified the phenomena of emerging social networks, but they do not confront how businesses can profit from the wisdom of crowds. WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME by Barry Libert and Jon Spector, Foreword by Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, is the first book to show anyone in business how to profit from the wisdom of crowds. Drawing on their own research and the insights from an enormous community of more than 4,000 people, Barry Libert and Jon Spector have written a book that reveals what works, and what doesn't, when you are building community into your decision making and business processes. In We Are Smarter Than Me, you will discover exactly how to use social networking and community in your business, driving better decision-making and greater profitability. The book shares powerful insights and new case studies from product development, manufacturing, marketing, customer service, finance, management, and beyond. You'll learn which business functions can best be accomplished or supported by communities; how to provide effective moderation, balance structure with independence, manage risk, define success, implement effective metrics, and much more. From tools and processes to culture and leadership, We Are Smarter than Me will help you transform the promise of social networking into a profitable reality.

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Meet the Author

This book is the result of an unprecedented wiki-based collaboration bringing together leading experts on social networking and communities at Wharton Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, and more than 4,000 business innovators from around the world, all of whom have generously contributed their extraordinary knowledge, insights, and personal experiences.

Read an Excerpt

Foreword—Social Networking Works by Don TapscottForeword—Social Networking Works by Don Tapscott

Many people emphasize the social aspect of social networking. MySpace is growing at 2 million new registrants per week and with over 200 million members, is well on its way to half a billion. Most college students in the United States are on Facebook. There is a new blog created every second of every day. Over a million avatars live in a virtual community called Second Life.

But the smartest leaders see that the profitable word to emphasize when it comes to social networking is working. Deep down, nothing less than a new mode of production is in the making.

After all, if you can make an encyclopedia (Wikipedia) via social networking and mass collaboration, what else could you do? How about an operating system (Linux) or applications software (Sugar CRM is one of 125,000 open source applications projects underway)? How about a mutual fund (marketocracy.com), a peer-to-peer lending system (zopa.com), or designer T-shirts (threadless.com)? How about producing a television ad for the Super Bowl? Viewers of this year's Super Bowl XLI watched a Doritos advertisement that was created and chosen by its customers on the Internet. Perhaps a complex physical good like a motorcycle? The Chinese motorcycle industry—now the largest in the world—is a sprawling network of parts makers with no single company like Harley Davidson pulling the strings. Or take one of the world's the most complicated products—a new generation jumbo jet. Rather than painstakingly designing its supply chain, Boeing coinnovated the 787 Dreamliner with thousands of partners around the world in a mind-boggling peer-oriented ecosystem.

In this new world of collaboration, peers often come together to create value, often outside the walls of traditional companies. Consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble is a perfect example. Until recently, P&G was notoriously secretive, and it was failing, punctuated by a stock collapse in 2000. New CEO A. G. Lafley led the company on an ambitious campaign to restore P&G's greatness by sourcing 50 percent of its innovations from outside the company. Today, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These so-called eBays for innovation have led to hundreds of new products, some of which turned out to be home runs. Five years after the stock implosion, P&G has doubled its share price and now boasts a portfolio of 22 billion-dollar brands.

Around the same time, gold-mining company Goldcorp was in a similar pickle. Its geologists could not determine whether its ailing mines held any more ore. The corporation was on the brink of folding. CEO Rob McEwan did something unheard of in his industry. He published all of the company's previously secret geological data on the Web and held a contest to so see if anyone could help find gold on the property. Seventy-seven submissions came from around the world, some using techniques and technologies Goldcorp had not heard of. For $500,000 in prizes, Goldcorp found over $3 billion of gold and the company's market value multiplied several times over. By opening up and collaborating, Goldcorp's shareholders prospered.

Predictably however, revolutionary new modes of production bring dislocation and confusion. They are often received with coolness or worse—outright mockery or hostility. Vested interests fight against change. Leaders of the old have great difficulty embracing the new. Others are concerned that the incentives for knowledge producers are disappearing in a world where individuals can pool their talents to create free goods that compete with proprietary marketplace offerings. People as wise as Bill Gates have argued that capitalism is undermined by any movement to assemble a global "creative commons" that contains large bodies of scientific and cultural content. They fear that these massive communities and new business models will reduce the proportion of our economy available for profitable activity.

The examples in this book suggest otherwise. With more than a billion individuals around the world connected by a new multimedia high-bandwidth medium of human communications, collaboration and teamwork have become the business world's biggest drivers of success. Companies are eclipsing competitors by linking with suppliers and customers to share information, innovate, and execute. By harnessing the wisdom and ability of individuals and crowds, both inside and outside their boundaries, smart companies in every industry are thriving.

This is likely the first book you have read, created in collaboration with a crowd, and as such, I hope you will remember it and find it useful. But it won't be your last. My hope is that it may inspire you to get involved in the mass collaboration revolution and, in doing so, engage with others, have fun, and prosper.

Don Tapscott, Chief Executive of the think tank New Paradigm and the author of 11 books, most recently, with Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

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